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The ruins were as a shadow on the land. Negative space, where an ancient city once stood. From the ground the shadows are invisible, long since overgrown and worn away with time.
Seen from above, the gaps and blank spaces form straight lines and arcs, spreading from a central point.
There is an Origin Core here.
"It worked."
Shae stumbles, slipping and sliding in the umbra as she collects her jacket and uses it to wrap up the seven crystal spheroids. She is going to need those later.
The very air feels... thick. Muffling. Slippery. There is no color at all, here inside the new magic she has created, and Shae can feel the gleam pressing gently against her mind, whispering of unattainable satisfaction. It's subtle, only really noticeable here in the midst of such a strong concentration of the new magical substrate, but that's fine. That's the point.
This is meant to be a solace, for the silent.
Shae gestures towards the dead young man's body.
"What was his name?"
"Then this? This will be the Isht," Shae decides.
Before continuing, she hesitates, but blit it, she can indulge herself with a villain monologue just this once.
"It will come to the lovesick, the lonesome, the longing, as the Scintillant comes for the dead. It will gleam for the deprived, as empulse kindles for the climax. Call upon it, and it will manifest its umbra flesh, taking a form directly driven by your desire. It is the end of social gatekeeping for sexual sensory experience. No man or woman will ever need wonder what it feels like to touch or be touched even by their wildest dream, or ever need be told they are not entitled to know because they cannot or will not navigate our society's obscenely stifling formalities."
Shae spreads her hands grandly.
"This is the end of the silence."
To punctuate her statement, Shae mentally pushes back against the muffling weight of the gleam, focusing on the unattended sensitivity of her hard nipples.
The gleam resists, at first, but the umbra responds.
Twin pseudopods sprout upwards from the black goo around Shae's feet, sucking mass in to grow as they rise, sinuous and bubbling. Each splits at the tip, flowering open into three thick flaps, and at the center, umbra forms into a pair of perfectly human-shaped lips.
Each three-sided pseudohand glomps onto one of Shae's breasts. Each pair of lips latches onto a nipple, and suckles her so sweetly.
Shae thrusts her chest out and moans in pleasure.
"S-see? I will take the Isht, and I will cover the known world in it."
Stretching her left hand out for effect, Shae begins tapping fingertip to thumb in sequence: the muscle trigger to purge her wombrider. At the same time, she closes her eyes and dwells on her womb, on how hot it would be to have a mass of psychoreactive sex goo hiding inside her, as though she were its mother and it, her amorphous spawn, lurking, waiting, using her as camouflage.
A feeling of liquid looseness accompanies the tiny ball of flesh that drops out of her womb, and she shoves her mind against the gleam while the fleshcraft magic remains, making her womb permeable.
While umbral mouths continue to suckle Shae's breasts, a thick tendril of umbra contracts and oozes upwards from between Shae's legs. It reaches her vagina and plunges in, flowing like a living liquid as it pumps up her canal and floods into her womb.
Umbra can manipulate its own density and mass to an extent, substantiating from and sublimating into gleam, but even so only about a tenth of the umbral mass coating the floor can fit into her, and even that leaves her belly swollen and heavy, almost doubling her own bodyweight.
It's like getting fucked by a gelatinous river. It feels weird and different and so good. Shae cums, hard.
She staggers, but the breast-sucking pseudopods thicken and extend, wrapping around her torso to hold her up.
Then the glassy floor, the glassy wall separating the two cubical rooms, crack under her feet and hands. Shae moans, confused. It feels like she's flickering into a flash state as she kindles, and she can't stop it, can't control it. It's happening on its own.
Well, that is unexpected and suboptimal, but it's not like she can fix the problem without another murder and another Origin Core to sacrifice. The fragments don't have the physical capacity to intercept Scintillant anymore, and she can't think of a mistake that could've caused this anyway.
Shae straightens up, trembling with the fading echoes of orgasm as the umbra continues to stimulate her sensitive body. She looks very pregnant, but not unnaturally so.
Time to go home.
Shae wants the remaining umbra to wrap around her body and carry her to the airship. This is much more difficult to frame sexually, but maybe if she just presses the intention into the gleam as hard as she can...
That's inconvenient, but not really unexpected.
Maybe if she fantasizes explicitly about each separate step in the process of the umbra taking a form that can carry her?
She starts by imagining as vividly as she can how good it would feel to rest her body by floating in a mass of umbra instead of standing on her own two feet, especially now that she's got the weight of a whole other girl hanging off her gut.
Umbra sluggishly extends upwards, climbing her legs and crawling up over her butt. The thick tendril resting in her vagina sprouts outwards, supporting her pregnant belly from the outside, and the pseudopods suckling her breasts drape themselves against her and melt into the larger mass.
It takes her weight, slowly thickening as the umbra oozes inwards, but it can't seem to just engulf her in a blob. To move it seems to require at least basic anatomical structures. It can't just arbitrarily control the shape of a liquid mass of itself.
Eerie strands of white gleam from the umbra where it has solidified the most to manage the effort of holding her up.
This really isn't the intended use. It's probably good that using the Isht like this is so round-a-bout even for the one who designed it and therefore knows exactly how to manipulate it. Shae adjusts her fantasizing to include more specific anatomy. Just imagining it isn't enough, she has to actually feel sexual desire for her fantasy to get the umbra to move, but that in particular has always been unusually easy for her to do on command.
Jacket. Shoes. Empyreal Blossoms. It would be so sexy if she didn't have to go pick those up herself, right?
And then... it would be nice to be pleasured while held high up in the air to enjoy the view and whatnot, cradled in soft flesh but carried by strong limbs. To the airship.
It takes a few tries, but eventually the umbra manages to pick itself up on three distinct, trunk-like legs and climb out onto the meadow. It never stops stimulating Shae's body, rubbing, sucking, fucking, all with the liquid caress of slick umbral flesh that shifts between amorphous pseudopods and almost recognizable arms, hands, cocks, and other hints of the human form.
It delivers Shae to the airship and settles itself inside the cabin to continue pleasuring her.
By then, Shae has had dozens of orgasms and is kind of wrung out. The umbra seems to know exactly how to touch her to make her want more, almost teasing in the way it doesn't quite give her the best possible orgasm.
Shae is not accustomed to thinking unsexy thoughts, but she tries anyway because she doesn't have time to recover from getting fucked until she passes out. Flying an airship is too complicated and delicate to do by proxy. She tries to mentally press her satiation into the gleam.
It's like trying to move a mountain. The gleam doesn't budge at all.
It's hard to even think the thought, like a thick fog full of sticky webs bogs down her mind as soon as she tries to contemplate not wanting more. She will always want more. She's not done. Stopping now would be agony.
Yeah, Shae doesn't care. She's always going to want more sex, but that doesn't mean it has to be now. Shae is very fortunate to have a lot of trusted lovers in her social circle. Shae. Is. Very. Satisfied. With. Her. Personal. Sex. Life.
The gleam buckles under the force of the thought, and color begins seeping back into her skin as the gleam dissipates. The umbra goes still, then melts off of her, oozing out into an inert puddle.
Shae sucks in a breath and wobbles over to the airship's controls.
That took way more effort than it should've. That feedback was an order of magnitude stronger than Shae predicted. Ultimately, the gleam behaves as expected, but that still took a disturbing amount of mental effort.
That... might actually be a problem. But realistically this is her one and only chance, and it did technically work as designed. Shae isn't going to call the whole thing off over a minor deviation. She can't.
But maybe she should come up with a contingency for purging the gleam from a human body, just in case.
Launching the airship is awkward for one person alone, but doable. It gets pointed in the right direction, and soon the overgrown ruins are left behind.
Traveling by air is faster than walking, but it'll still be a several day journey back to civilization. The airship is designed to move silently, powered by human muscles and exemplar strength, but it does have an outboard airscrew and an emergency supply tank of liquid nitrogen large enough to power the pneumatic engine at the stern of the airship's envelope through the night and into the next day.
Shae finds that one of the crystal eggs from the destroyed Origin Core still contains her Exemplar Harness in intact form. Masturbating with the crystal egg doesn't seem to have any effect. It doesn't suck up her empulse or form a link. But she finds that if she tries to imbue empulse with her heartbeats, it doesn't go like it would into a normal object but it does give her low-level feedback and let her manipulate the internal mechanisms enough to reinstantiate the Exemplar Harness.
It emerges from the crystal egg in a stream of rippling brightness, colors bursting vividly through the liquid glassy mass before it solidifies into black and pink flesh.
She can't wear the Exemplar Harness over her swollen abdomen, but the crystal eggs themselves show promise if some of the Origin Core's base functionality is still there.
The fragments are lacking any of the active systems that allowed the Origin Core to be so easily used, but the substrate is still viable. It will be many days of work to rebuild anything useful, requiring new systems to be built from first principles via slow external inputs.
But once the capacity to form a resonant link is restored, the crystal eggs might indeed provide a way to create an anti-gleam contingency. Just not any time soon.
The city of Sanguine Primus stretches across a vast steppe, bordered by low mountains to the north, a dropoff to the south, and tall glass-like walls to the east and west. Farmland stretches south from the cliff face for half a demispan, worked by machines and Archon Golems.
An Archon Golem is a large, ponderous beast, with six splayed legs, an eye at each end of its body, and several manipulator tentacles slung under its belly. Its flesh is a bland, milky white, and while not visible from a distance, it contains a human criminal within its main body, one who was sentenced to civil service; a euphemism for being medically crippled and relegated to life as an involuntary empulse generator.
The city itself shines under the light of the solfire. Spires of blocky construction tower high enough to break up the line of the mountains beyond. Much of it is actual glass, used to complement the aesthetics of the more-than-glass spread through the city's heart. A suspended High Road bisects the farmland, jutting out from the center of the cliff and continuing through the air above the fields.
An airship patrols the sky above the fields, but this airship is not intended for speed or stealth. Its envelope is a thin shell of exemplate glass, forged in extreme heat to contain a set of rotary light sails in near-vacuum that power its propulsion.
Her own (stolen) airship ran out of compressed nitrogen a while ago. Shae stashes it in a craggy copse overlooking the fields and makes for the High Road on foot, leaving the bulk of the Isht behind. She puts on her shoes and her jacket and, after some effort, her leggings, finds pockets for all of the crystal eggs, collects two full canteens from the airship cabin, and cradles her swollen belly in her arms as she treks across the crop fields towards the small town that hangs from the underside of the High Road like a boxy stalactite.
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